Is The EU's Proposed Reform Of Music Licensing Doomed From The Start?

from the signs-aren't-good dept

Music collection societies often figure in Techdirt thanks to their attempts to wring licensing payments from people on absurd grounds, like trying to make them pay for playing music to horses, or for singing old folk songs. But in Europe, there's another issue. Because each country has its own music collection society, digital music startups wishing to operate across Europe must negotiate not one, but dozens of separate licenses – a major obstacle to overcome.

New digital technologies are opening up great opportunities for creators, consumers and businesses alike. Increased demand for online access to cultural content (e.g. music, films, books) does not recognise borders or national restrictions. Neither do the online services used to access them. This is where collecting societies come into play, in particular in the music sector, where they collectively manage the licensing of copyright-protected music tracks for online use on behalf of composers and lyricists and collect and redistribute to them corresponding royalties.

However, some collecting societies struggle to adapt to the requirements of the management of rights for online use of musical works, in particular in a cross-border context. As a result of today’s proposal, those collecting societies willing to engage in the multi-territorial licensing of their repertoire would therefore have to comply with European standards. This would make it easier for service providers to obtain the necessary licences for music to be distributed online across the EU and to ensure that revenue is correctly collected and fairly distributed to composers and lyricists.

That reference to collecting societies that "struggle to adapt to the requirements of the management of rights for online use of musical works" is a pretty obvious dig at organizations like GEMA, which has been extremely inflexible when it comes to online licensing of music in Germany. So we can probably expect vociferous resistance to any change from many of the collecting societies that have enjoyed milking their legal monopolies to the full. Surprisingly, though, some artists don't seem too enthusiastic either:

A proposed EU law to give musicians more rights over their royalties has angered bands like Radiohead and Pink Floyd, who accused the European Commission of breaking promises to tackle the problem of musicians' missing pay.

The issue here seems to be that collection societies have a tendency to hold on to money that they should be distributing to artists, also referred to by the European Commission. The fact that musicians have already gone on the attack suggests that we are going to see some fierce lobbying coming from multiple directions. However, it may be that this directive is doomed to fail for quite another reason.

Last week’s vote on ACTA -- although hardly a surprise for those who’ve been following – was a reminder about the big debate currently going on, about how to balance intellectual property rights with Internet freedoms

For me it’s about making it easier for artists to promote their work widely, and make a living from it: without constraining the immense innovation of the online world. And, for me, the current copyright system achieves all of those objectives poorly.

That’s why I’m convinced we need to reform copyright for the digital age. For me, merely making enforcement more and more heavy-handed is not the solution -- especially if it results in draconian measures like cutting off internet access.

But a good start – and I hope a principle on which everybody could agree – is that we should make it easier to legally access the content you love.

That's a very welcome statement, coming as it does from one of the most senior EU politicians. Significantly, she also has some words for the European Parliament regarding the proposed directive on music licensing:

our proposal needs to be agreed by the European Parliament and Council. Some previous attempts by us to modernise copyright rules -- like our relatively modest proposal on orphan works -- were significantly watered down by the legislator. This time I hope the Parliament and Council are more aware of the views citizens have expressed: that people love the openness of the Internet, and want easier access to more content.

That "modest proposal on orphan works" was gutted by the relevant European Parliament committee, as a previous Techdirt post explained. One key reason why the final form of the directive turned out so badly is that its rapporteur (the EU parliamentarian with overall responsibility for the legislation) was the copyright maximalist Marielle Gallo, who was not only one of the few to vote in favor of ACTA, but went so far as to brand ACTA dissent as a "soft form of terrorism".

Unfortunately, it seems that Gallo will also be the rapporteur on this new music licensing proposal. Assuming she gets her way, that pretty much guarantees that any directive that emerges from the long process of political wrangling won't do much to address the deep underlying problems with music licensing. It may even make them worse, judging by what happened with the hostage works directive under her guidance.

Marielle Gallo is the incarnation of how a politician should not operate in the parliament:
- Very opinionated and zealous in protecting one "the industry"
- Extremely one-sided in her rapporteuring (The best report on ACTA from the committees was from the greek S&D-member Droutsas in LIBE)
- Impossible to convince of problems in her world-view

The french people should try to get rid of that disgrace, but with HADOPI and a general extreme maximalist opinion from french conservatives, I doubt that removing her will be enough.

Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, is very likely the only person in power in the eu that not only knows about tech, but also understands the tech, and what its capable of, and where it is heading.

i have a thought for orphan works that would solve all the problems with it but would never be passed. just put out a list of all the orphan works and then say in 1 year these are all in the public domain if no one puts a legitimate copyright claim on them. and persons who submit a claim after this year will be denied reclaiming the work even if they have a legitimate claim. boom 1 year all the orphan works are gone. send notices to all publishers and studios and make the data easily accessible and widely publicized.

Re: Re:

Smart thinking and that is what the danish rightholder-industry is trying. Problem is that danish works are so seldomly copied and they are so far below 1% of the content of the internet that it is pretty much worthless to common people and with no commercials for it, it is worthless for youtube-clips and other fast-moving, low income per-unit works, which is where the orphans are common...

And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the words of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living.

Yep. And some morons insisted on granting copyrights over the death of the author, and what Macaulay predicted happened.

Plus, what he did not anticipate, the fact that copyright came under inheritance law produced its own category of legal nightmares, where every heir could prevent a publication, but only all heirs together could authorize one. Institutionalized destruction of culture; that's what this is called. And orphan works, of course.